Philosophy

Traditional and Experimental Readings

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D., Ron Mallon, Ph.D., and Shaun Nichols, Ph.D.

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This is a First Edition.

Philosophy

Traditional and Experimental Readings

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D., Ron Mallon, Ph.D., and Shaun Nichols, Ph.D.

Description

Recently, the fields of empirical and experimental philosophy have generated tremendous excitement, due to unexpected results that have challenged philosophical dogma. Responding to this trend, Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is the first introductory philosophy reader to integrate cutting-edge work in empirical and experimental philosophy with traditional philosophy.

Featuring coverage that is equal parts historical, contemporary, and empirical/experimental, this topically organized reader provides students with a unique introduction to both the core and the vanguard of philosophy. The text is enhanced by pedagogical tools including commentary on each reading and chapter, study questions, suggested further readings, and a glossary.

A Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/allhoff contains a downloadable version of the Instructor's Manual along with Student Resources: self-quizzes, essay/discussion questions, interactive flashcards with key terms, and web links.

Philosophy

Traditional and Experimental Readings

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D., Ron Mallon, Ph.D., and Shaun Nichols, Ph.D.

Author Information

Fritz Allhoff is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at Western Michigan University.

Ron Mallon is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at The University of Arizona.

Contributors:

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D., as an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at The Australian National University. Fritz has had visiting positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford. He works primarily in applied ethics, ethical theory, and philosophy of biology. His latest book, Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

James R. Beebe, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is also a member of the Center for Cognitive Science and Director of the Experimental
Epistemology Research Group. His research interests within mainstream epistemology include naturalistic epistemology, the nature and extent of skeptical challenges to our everyday knowledge, and the nature of a priori knowledge. His experimental work centers on the study epistemic cognition, i.e., the ways in which people make judgments about knowledge, rationality and evidence.

Alexandra Bradner, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Denison University who works in general philosophy of science, history and philosophy of biology, and epistemology. Her work on the pragmatics of explanation has appeared in Cognitive Processing and Teaching Philosophy. She is currently conducting an experimental study on Thomson's violinist with Jeanine Schroer. Alexandra thinks there
is no upper limit on the number of times you have to explain to philosophers that experimental philosophy is not about polling the folk and inducing your philosophical theory from their responses.

Emily Esch, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota. Her work is primarily in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In philosophy of mind, she has focused especially on the nature of consciousness, and her work in epistemology has explored the differences between 'knowledge-that' and know-how.'

Ron Mallon, Ph.D., Ron Mallon is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University, St. Louis. His research is in social
philosophy, philosophy of cognitive psychology, and moral psychology. He has co-directed an NEH Summer Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, been a chair of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology Meeting, and he has been the recipient of a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowship at the Princeton's University Center for Human Values, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.

Eric Mandelbaum, Ph.D., has been the James Martin Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy and Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. In 2011 he took up an ACLS New Faculty Fellowship at Yale University's Departments of Cognitive Science and Philosophy and the Mind/Brain/Behavior Postdoctoral fellowship at
Harvard University. He was awarded the Cognitive Science Society's inaugural Robert J. Glushko Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Theses in Cognitive Science in 2011. His work focuses on cognitive architecture, belief acquisition, belief storage, judgments of responsibility, and implicit racism.

Stephen G. Morris, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy at The College of Staten Island (CUNY). Prior to this, he served as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Missouri Western State University where he received a Distinguished Professor Award in 2008 and the James V. Mehl Scholarship Award in 2009. Stephen's primary research interests include free will, meta-ethics, applied ethics, and the philosophy of science. His papers
have appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophical Psychology.

Shaun Nichols, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment and co-author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading. He is editor of The Architecture of the Imagination and co-editor of Experimental Philosophy (with Joshua Knobe). He has also published over 50 articles in academic journals, both in philosophy and psychology. At the University of Arizona he directs a research group on experimental philosophy, which attempt to uncover the psychological factors that influence how we think about philosophical matters.

Mark Phelan, Ph.D., is an Assistant
Professor of Philosophy at Lawrence University. He received his Doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Yale University from 2009-2011. Mark's primary research interests are in the philosophies of language, mind, and cognitive science. He has published in Philosophical Studies, Mind and Language, and Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, among other journals.

Michael J. Shaffer, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at St. Cloud State University. He has been a fellow of the Rotman Institute of Science and Values at the University of Western Ontario, a fellow of the Center for Formal Epistemology at Carnegie-Mellon University, a Lakatos fellow at the London School of Economics and an
NEH fellow at the University of Utah. His primary research interests are in epistemology, logic and the philosophy of science.

Tamler Sommers, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Houston. His research concerns issues in ethics, metaethics, and the philosophy of punishment. He is the author of two books, Relative Justice (Princeton, 2011) and A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (McSweeney's, 2009). Other recent publications include 'Experimental Philosophy and Free Will' (Philosophy Compass), 'The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor' (Biology and Philosophy), 'More Work for Hard Incompatibilism' (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), and 'The Objective Attitude' (Philosophical
Quarterly).

Kevin Timpe, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University. He has held visiting fellowships at Oxford University and the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Kevin's primary research interests are in the metaphysics of free will, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory. He is the author of two books, Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives and Free Will in Philosophical Theology (both with Continuum Press), and over a dozen journal articles. He is the editor of two books, Arguing about Religion (Routledge) and the forthcoming Virtues and This Vices (OUP, with Craig Boyd).

Anand J. Vaidya, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University in
Silicon Valley, California. His primary areas of research are epistemology, especially modality and methodology, and philosophy of mind, especially rationality and intuition. Anand has co-edited a series of books on Business Ethics and the HIstory of Philosophy as well as published papers on the epistemology of modality and the methodology of experimental philosophy. At present he is doing research on the philosophy of economics and the capabilities approach to justice.

Chris Weigel, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University. Her interests include moral psychology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and free will. She is a co-editor of Living Ethics. After attending the 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on
experimental philosophy, she began using experiments to examine the role of psychological distance on intuitions about free will.

Josh Weisberg, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. He received his doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2007. His research is in the philosophy of mind, with a focus on consciousness. His work has appeared in philosophical journals such as Analysis, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Psychology, Synthese, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, as well as in the ground-breaking volume What Philosophy Can Tell You About Your Cat (Open Court 2008). He went into philosophy to avoid taking math in college.

Jennifer (Jen) Cole Wright, Ph.D., is an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Psychology (and an Affiliate with the Department of Philosophy) at the College of Charleston. Having earned graduate degrees in both psychology and philosophy, she has published in journals across several domains, including Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Cognition, Mind & Language, and Philosophical Studies. Her main research interests are in the area of moral psychology across the life-span and she studies everyone from young children to adults.

Philosophy

Traditional and Experimental Readings

Fritz Allhoff, Ph.D., Ron Mallon, Ph.D., and Shaun Nichols, Ph.D.

Reviews and Awards

"Finally we have a textbook for Introduction to Philosophy courses that shows students the direction philosophy is headed in the twenty-first century. This is an ideal textbook for instructors who want to expose their students to a broad range of productive ways in which traditional philosophical debates can be advanced and transformed by material from leading cognitive scientists and experimental philosophers."--Stephen Stich, Rutgers University

"Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings is designed to exploit the rapidly growing trend towards experimental and empirically informed approaches to philosophy. The editors are absolutely first rate. I believe a good many people will be much more excited by this book than by the competition."--John Doris, Washington University in St. Louis

"Allhoff, Mallon, and Nichols's highly innovative and extraordinarily useful anthology is a tour de force. The carefully chosen readings will foster in their readers the enthusiasm and curiosity that stir philosophical thinking, and the inclusion of recent experimental readings will show them that philosophy has much to gain, and nothing to lose, in rubbing its elbows with the empirical sciences."--Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh

"This is a brilliant volume, unlike anything previously published. The classic readings frame philosophy's deepest and most persistent questions. The cutting-edge scientific readings offer new answers and introduce the methods that are transforming philosophy into a vibrant, interdisciplinary enterprise."--Joshua Greene, Harvard University

"This is exactly the volume I wish I could have read when I was first studying philosophy. It presents the classic works of Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes right next to cutting-edge cognitive science papers that go after traditional philosophical questions using the latest experimental methods. The result is a collection that is far more than the sum of its parts. By bringing these texts together in a single volume, the editors allow us to see each of them in a new and very different light."--Joshua Knobe, Yale University